Donald Panther-Yates is a Georgia native of Choctaw-Cherokee and Sephardic Jewish descent. He earned a Ph.D. in classical studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before teaching at the University of Notre Dame and elsewhere. In 2003, he founded DNA Testing Systems, a genetic genealogy service. His latest book, Old Souls in a New World, is about an expedition of Greeks, Jews and Egyptians that inadvertently founded the Cherokee Indian nation in the third century B.C.